Maintaining health is a very important aspect of human life. Public awareness of health has increased but due to escalating medical costs, time restraints on physician and medical specialization, medicine has become more production oriented, impersonal and compartmentalized. Much of the administration of health services has remained qualitative and depends heavily on the knowledge and competence of a physician. However, in today's world, the availability of sophisticated technologies and compounding scientific advancements has raised the public's expectations of what the standard of health care should be. It has become unrealistic and impractical to project these expectations solely onto the current model of practicing medicine. Individuals need a means by which they can become more active and effective in the management of their health. Among other things, individuals need to be able to assess their health and understand what is normal and what is abnormal, relative to their own unique characteristics which include age, gender, physical characteristics, race, ethnicity, geographical region and so on. Also, individuals need simple and quick access to personalized health strategies that address behavioral modifications, environment optimization, nutritional optimization, physical fitness, early detection of abnormalities and disease prevention tactics that are tailored to each individual's unique characteristics and situation. As importantly, there is the need to quantitatively evaluate and diagnose a condition and gage the progression of a condition and the effectiveness of a health strategy or medical treatment.
The general public and particularly workers in certain occupations are subjected to an array of illnesses, diseases and exotic health risks which, among other things can include exposure to dangerous microbes and toxic/noxious nuclear, biological and chemical substances. The effects of these exposures can be debilitating and even lethal. There is no easily accessible, broad network of health monitoring systems available that can be sensitized to detect individual symptoms of an exposure and rapidly establish exposure type and severity or assess particular patterns and trends in order to determine the impact across small or large population group and geographical area. People need an easy to use health monitoring system that can conveniently monitor their health and alert them of possible exposures to a toxic and noxious substance. Once an exposure is detected, the system needs to advise them of appropriate intervention, decontamination and treatment options and notify the appropriate health authorities of the scale, location and extent of the exposure or exposures. With such a system, exposures could be detected early, often before other evidence of contamination is available and before the contamination can spread.
A significant portion of the population is classified as chronically ill. Many of those individuals go undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated for years. They frequently suffer debilitating symptoms that affect their ability to work or even care for themselves. In many cases, these individuals exhibit a complex array of physical, physiological and behavioral abnormalities that can offer clues or pointers as to the core cause or causes of their condition. However, these individuals typically do not have access to effective and intelligent monitoring systems and have few choices but to suffer in silence. There is a clear need for a comprehensive and integrated system that could conveniently interact with the subject in order to detect, track, document and assess certain key environmental, behavioral, physical and physiological characteristics and peculiarities in order to establish meaningful correlations and to develop patterns and trends that can point to a core cause or causes of the condition.
The population is growing older, generally more prosperous and more self directed, particularly in the area of health. As they age, they are displaying an unusually strong desire to extend their youthful appearance and vitality beyond those of many previous generations. Currently there are no comprehensive and integrated systems or technologies available that would permit these individuals to pursue credible health and longevity augmentation strategies. To be effective, these strategies must take into consideration the individual's unique living environments, behaviors, physical characteristics and physiological characteristics in conjunction with credible scientific methodologies. Nor are there any comprehensive health assessment systems available that would gauge an individual's health and aging process, relative to specific population groups. Also there is a need for a system that can conveniently monitor the effectiveness of a strategy, treatment or regime in order to apply the safest and most effective approach.
The development, compilation and storage of health histories are a problem. In many cases these health histories are developed manually and are dispersed among numerous health care providers. The documents themselves are often difficult to understand, due to the volume of information, legibility issues, writing styles, obsolete data and fragmented information. In emergency situations, physicians are often left with little medical history and are forced to make important treatment decisions based on limited data There is a need for a centralized health history archive that permanently maintains health and medical data that is regularly updated by the individual and each of their various health care providers. This data could then be made available to a physician at any time; any place through the use of a communications network such as the internet. Also, the health of an individual is often the result of certain key genetic predispositions. In today's world, there is very little personal health history information permanently preserved and readily available for retrieval. Having such information would help each new generation better understand their genetic predispositions and pursue those health strategies that are most likely to benefit them.
In the past, attempts have been made to address certain specific issues in the areas relating to health condition monitoring, abnormality detection, data analysis, health strategy development, documenting health histories, and various other similar health subjects. Along with human intervention, various computerized methodologies have been used. However, these computerized methodologies have been used in isolation and do not represent a comprehensive health maintenance system with highly integrated components, widely dispersed across a broad network.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,692,436 disclose a health care information system having a health kiosk providing blood pressure testing, a health and fitness evaluation, and a medication encyclopedia. The health kiosk typically interfaces to a computer or server, such as a pharmacy computer or a remote server which compares pharmaceuticals selected by a user to information in the medication encyclopedia to determine compatibility for prescription medications and over-the-counter medications. In some systems, the kiosk also supplies one item or more of an extended health information, a weight scale constructed into the seat of the kiosk, a directory of health care service and product providers, an a directory of community health, support, and service groups.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,024,369 provides for a personal health monitoring system for balancing the comprehensive health of a user, wherein a current health profile for a user is monitored at a personal health monitoring system. The current health profile includes multiple monitored physical parameters and multiple monitored environmental parameters. Multiple actions for selection by the user are received at the personal health monitoring system. The multiple actions are prioritized according to the current health profile and designated allowances for the user at the personal health monitoring system, such that the personal health monitoring system aids the user in selecting from among the multiple actions in order to balance the comprehensive health of the user. Multiple tasks for scheduling in a user's electronic schedule are scheduled according to the current health profile and designated allowances for the user at the personal health monitoring system.
The available solutions for a health information collection and retrieval system still requires a lot of human intervention and lacks the integration and the computerized, user-friendly interface approach. The available systems fall short of providing a single, comprehensive, highly integrated health maintenance system that is capable of collecting a broad array of personal history and health data, developing and maintaining individualized health baseline profiles, identifying and tracking patterns and trends, detecting abnormalities and peculiarities, cross-correlating particular health characteristics to reference material and authoritative standards, conducting comparative analysis in order to establish a relative condition (i.e. conditions relative to those of a population norm), developing personalized health strategies, monitoring specific health conditions, monitoring drug interactions and reaction, monitoring the effectiveness of a treatment or prescribed strategy, developing and maintaining health archives, and offering a host of personalized health products through an integrated marketplace.
Accordingly, what is needed is a comprehensive, highly automated and integrated health maintenance system which is capable of offering a broad array of personalized health services and products. These include convenient access, a user-friendly interface, personal and family health history data collection, individualized health profiles, comparative assessments of health conditions (i.e. an individual's health condition relative to that of a similar population group) health patterns and trends tracking, abnormality detection, health data analysis and health assessments, personalized health strategies, health condition monitoring, drug reaction and interaction monitoring, treatment effectiveness monitoring, health history archiving and an array of personalized commercial health products.